It was cool playing in the sunshine today

November 13, 2014

Hold a glass of ice-cold, crisp dry white wine up to the sun. Admire the play of light as you move the glass around. Now take a mouthful of the wine; swirl it around in your mouth; feel the cold tingle and taste the acidity and the October reminiscences of fruit and summer freshness. Then swallow and repeat.

The point? No point. Some people just like to enjoy a glass of dry white wine and who can blame them.

Wine is fine but my sunny day started with coffee

This morning someone gave me this vintage first generation six-sticker McDonald’s McCafe loyalty card. It was in mint condition. I loved it and vowed to keep it forever. Then some other “hobo” asked if I could spot them a coffee. By-bye collectors item coffee card!

This tall stuff with the white plumes now grows like weeds all over the city. I think it’s called pampas grass (Cortaderia selloana). It’s drought resistant and landscapers will tell you it’s quite attractive.

In 2009, when I worked as one of the custodians at the Vancouver Masonic Centre, the building society spent something like $20,000 to landscape the front of the building with, among other things, these white plume things.

If they were the saddest $20,000 worth of plants I’d ever seen it wasn’t going to be for lack of proper care on the part of the custodians.

One of the building society directors was in the habit of inspecting the work any of us did (“Inspect what you expect” he used to say) and he took immediate issue with the way we were failing to properly weed the new landscaping.

Before he complained however, the one-time middle manager took it upon himself to correct the deficiency of our work.

Another custodian and myself later judged that he ripped out up to $1,000 worth of the actual plants, which differed from weeds particularly in their expense.

The sun was lighting up the perennial Christmas lights strung around the trunk of a palm tree on the corner of Alder Street and 14th Avenue (would you believe this entire sentence was lifted from a Raymond Chandler novel?).

It was about 2 p.m. and I was nearly in East Vancouver when I took this pretty picture. All that shiny blue stuff is ice persisting in the shade of a plumbing truck — the frozen surface of a pool of standing water in a back alley.

The sun, the colours, the translucency! As long as nature never tires of putting on the display it does every autumn, I swear I’ll never tire of looking at it. Click the images to enlarge them.